Alzheimer's disease (AD) causes progressive dementia with consequent formation of amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, gliosis and neuronal loss. The disease occurs in both genetic and sporadic forms whose clinical course and pathological features are quite similar. Three genes have been discovered to date which, when mutated, cause an autosomal dominant form of Alzheimer's disease. These encode the amyloid protein precursor (APP) and two related proteins, presenilin-1 (PS1) and presenilin-2 (PS2), which, as their names suggest, are structurally and functionally related. Mutations in any of the three proteins have been observed to enhance proteolytic processing of APP via an intracellular pathway that produces amyloid beta peptide (Aβ peptide, or sometimes here as Abeta), a 40–42 amino acid long peptide that is the primary component of amyloid plaque in AD.
Dysregulation of intracellular pathways for proteolytic processing may be central to the pathophysiology of AD. In the case of plaque formation, mutations in APP, PS1 or PS2 consistently alter the proteolytic processing of APP so as to enhance formation of Aβ 1–42, a form of the Aβ peptide which seems to be particularly amyloidogenic, and thus very important in AD. Different forms of APP range in size from 695–770 amino acids, localize to the cell surface, and have a single C-terminal transmembrane domain. The Abeta peptide is derived from a region of APP adjacent to and containing a portion of the transmembrane domain. Normally, processing of APP at the α-secretase site cleaves the midregion of the Aβ sequence adjacent to the membrane and releases the soluble, extracellular domain of APP from the cell surface. This α-secretase APP processing creates soluble APP-α, which is normal and not thought to contribute to AD. Pathological processing of APP at the β- and γ-secretase sites, which are located N-terminal and C-terminal to the α-secretase site, respectively, produces a very different result than processing at the α site. Sequential processing at the β- and γ-secretase sites releases the Aβpeptide, a peptide possibly very important in AD pathogenesis. Processing at the β- and γ-secretase sites can occur in both the endoplasmic reticulum (in neurons) and in the endosomal/lysosomal pathway after reinternalization of cell surface APP (in all cells). Despite intense efforts, for 10 years or more, to identify the enzymes responsible for processing APP at the β and γ sites, to produce the Aβ peptide, those proteases remained unknown until recently.
The identification and characterization of the β secretase enzyme, termed Aspartyl Protease 2 (Asp2) has been established. In addition, the X-ray crystal structure of human beta secretase in complex with a peptide inhibitor was solved and published Hong et al., Science 290: 150–53 (2000) from protein expressed in E. coli that contained no covalent sugar (glycosylation) at any of the four putative glycosylation sites within the enzyme.